Introducing the crawler pattern

Note

I can’t take credit for the establishment of this pattern; I stumbled upon a variant of this pattern in use by a colleague of mine, Graeme Christie (https://github.com/graemechristie), who used it to roll out config for a GitHub app being used internally. It is a very useful pattern to have in your toolkit when working within organizations.

The crawler pattern is a technique where desired repositories or objects are input into a GitHub workflow matrix, triggering an individual action for each repository within a runner. We can then perform actions in an ephemeral environment on the repository, allowing us to use the runners as disposable workers.

I find this is a useful way for organizations to manage multiple repositories that need to implement widespread changes. Some organizations facing mass change rollout face a dilemma:

• They can tediously manually apply these changes, dismissing the advantages of DevOps.
• They can...